The Independence of Kosovo is the vindication of a people

Besnik Sinani
The declaration of independence of Kosovo was a cause of collective celebration for Albanians and non Albanians alike who saw it as an act of justice and pursue of freedom. For many of us, however, it had also a personal significance, related to what Kosovo had meant to each of us as individuals. To me, it was a vindication of the Kosovars I had known since when in my earliest memories, Kosovo was perceived as a land of pain.
In his book Ra ky mort dhe u pame, Albanian novelist, Ismail Kadare, points at how the massive forced exodus of Kosovar Albanians from Kosovo was also the chance for Albanians to meet with each other in that day of tremendous human sorrow. Divided by borders and ideologies, Albanians on both sides of the border, had been denied a common shared existence as a people who share together their sense of belonging, identity, and a common historical imagination. The event of expulsion of Kosovars from their houses brought Albanians face to face with each other.
For me, however, that day arrived earlier, in the early 1990s, when three young Kosovar Albanians in their twenties, knocked at the door of our apartment in Tirana. In Kosovo, people had become suspicious of the number of Kosovar conscripts in the army of the Yugoslav Federation who would return home dead in sealed coffins. The families were occasionally told that they had died accidentally. Albanians decided to open the coffins only to see that their sons had been cold bloodedly murdered in the most despicable, inhumane manner. The three young Kosovars, who came that day in Tirana, had fled Kosovo upon receiving a conscription notice from the Army of Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. They had gone to Macedonia, from where had crossed the border in Dibra, and over there someone had given them my father’s address. Meeting with them and listening to their story, was my first human contact with the ongoing tragedy in Kosovo.
It is difficult now to put events in exact time frame, but sometime later, I remember meeting an acquaintance of the family in the streets of Tirana. By his side, there was a teenage girl whose abnormal behavior made everyone uncomfortable, till when we were told that the girl was actually from Kosovo. She was one of the many victims of the poisoning of Kosovar high school students from the regime of Milosevic, who suffered from brain damage.
As the first pictures from the massacres in Decan and elsewhere in Kosovo, at the beginning of the conflict, were smuggled out side the country, the world was becoming slowly aware of the crimes being perpetrated inside Kosovo. I remember when some of those pictures were exhibited at the National Museum in Tirana. Everyone I met at the exhibition had it written in their faces a sense of horror and disbelief. I can point exactly at the newsstand in Queens, New York, when I picked a copy of the New York Times which had in its front page, pictures of massacred Kosovars, among them a child and a pregnant woman. I remember feeling this mix of nausea and desire to cry.
At the time of the bombing campaign against Serb troops by NATO airplanes, a friend of mine called me from Fort Dix, New Jersey, the military base turned into a refugee camp for those who had fled the war in Kosovo. I remember the story of a man whose bus on the way to Macedonia had been stopped by cetniks, people who identified themselves as Bosnian Serbs, and who in their distorted mind told their victims that they had come to Kosovo to continue the killing of Muslims as in Bosnia. They forced their victims to start digging their own graves. They had survived only because the cetnicks had been urgently called to report for some other ‘assignment.’ I remember an old man with a kidney condition who had asked his son to leave him behind, but whose son had carried him for two weeks in his shoulders, hiding in forests. Two times the old man had attempted to kill himself with a knife because the absence of a doctor and a catheter was causing him unsupportable pain. And every time, members of the family were able to prevent him.
To me these experiences were part of a process of demystification. I had grown up hearing about the brave, warrior like Kosovars, with long mustaches, rifle in their hand, fighting with a red flag by their side. As many other nations, we had fed a heroic image that occupied our knowledge of the Albanians beyond the border, that excluded any notion of common people, with daily concerns and aspirations. The people that I met reflected greatness and flaws like every other people in the world. And that is why they deserved to demand the rights aspired to by all the people in the world.
As we follow the debates prior and after the declaration of independence, it is important that Albanians and those who believe in their right for self-determination make their case in support for independence in terms of international law, and historical arguments. As Professor Noel Malcolm wrote recently, even the Serbs, when they occupied the Albanian vilayet of Kosovo from the Ottoman Empire, considered it a colony. Therefore, we can justly proclaim that the liberation of Kosovo was an act of de-colonization. However, beyond any theoretical legal articulation, or historical argumentation about battles and wars, kings and knights long gone by, we celebrate the independence of Kosovo in the name of the people of Kosovo, those who died and those who live, and in the name of their God-given right to live in dignity as free people. In echo of the memory of the horrors that countless Kosovars suffered, we should determinately state: never again.